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Quick Start Guide

DAISY DTB Production Quick start reference

This is a short tutorial on how to use Obi to create a Digital Talking Book (DTB) compliant with DAISY 3 standards. This is not a complete manual, but should help you get a quick start on creating your first DTB.

Screen layout:

Obi screen is divided into five segments:

TOC view (F6)

Content view (F6)

Transport bar. (Ctrl+F6)

Metadata view (Ctrl+Alt+M)

Panel splitter

We can navigate among these views by pressing Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+Shift+Tab.

1) Start Obi. A dialog box appears showing various options. Select the first one - Create a new project. Obi opens Create new project dialog box displaying the following fields:

Field

Field Type

Description

Title

Edit Box

Enter a title of your project. This will be the title of the exported DTB.

Automatically create a title section with this title

Checkbox

If checked, Obi will create a section for the title section.

ID

Edit Box

Enter a unique identifier for the book. This identifier should be compliant with the scheme of allotting identifiers to a book in your organization. You can leave this field with the default value provided, if you are not sure at the moment. ID is stored in the metadata and can be changed any time.

Generate

Button

Generates an identifier for your project randomly and fills in the ID field.

Location

Edit Box

Enter the location where you want to store your project. You can also browse for a location by Clicking the Select button or pressing Alt+S.

Select

Button

Opens a Windows file browser to select a directory for your project. If the selected location is not empty, Obi will suggest one. Click Yes or press Alt+Y to accept or click No or press Alt+N to ignore.

2) Enter the information in the fields listed above, and click on the OK button. The Audio settings dialog gets displayed; click OK. A blank project is opened in the work area of Obi.

3) Now, the main structure of the book should be created, and the best place to create it is TOC view. Keep in mind, Obi uses a hierarchical structure of sections for each entity of the book. This means that whether it’s a chapter, a topic or a sub-topic – each of them will be mapped to a section, though their levels will be different. Use the following commands to create the sections and subsections:

Add section (Ctrl+H)

Add subsection (Ctrl+Shift+H)

Insert Section (Ctrl+Alt+H)

The sections created by you will be shown in both the views – TOC view and Content view.

4) After creating the book structure (sections and subsections), audio should be placed in them doing live recording or by importing existing audio files.

Live recording:

o Select a section in content view & click the record button on the transport bar, or press Ctrl+R for starting pre recording monitoring. The amplitude of microphone input will be displayed in graphical peak meter as well as textual peak meter. You may adjust the microphone volume using the system microphone amplitude control.

o Click start recording on the transport bar or press Ctrl+R again to start recording.

o If you want to skip pre recording monitoring and start recording directly, press Ctrl+Shift+R. However, it is advisable to monitor the audio before recording for the first time in a session.

Operations available while live recording:

Mark phrase (K)

Mark page (P)

Mark section (H)

Importing external audio files:

If pre-recorded audio files are available in wav or mp3 format, they can be imported into a section by performing the following:

o Select a section or a phrase in the Content View.

o Press Ctrl+I. The Import audio files dialog gets displayed.

o The dialog box will show the list of files to be imported, few other buttons, and checkboxes.

Obi will import the audio content from the files and split it into phrases.

5) After the audio content of the book has been placed, it should be verified and edited, if necessary. Use the Up and Down arrow keys to select a section, and then, Right or Left arrow keys to select a phrase of the selected section. Use the following commands for editing the book content:

To edit a phrase or its audio content:

Merge phrase (Ctrl+M)

Split phrase (Ctrl+Q)

Phrase detection (Ctrl+Shift+P)

To edit a section:
Commands available in Content view:

Merge sections (Ctrl+Shift+M)

Split section (Ctrl+Shift+Q)

Commands available in TOC view:

Increase level of section (Ctrl+Shift+Right Arrow)

Decrease level of section (Ctrl+Shift+Left Arrow)

6) Now that all the contents of the project of the book have been entered and verified, it is time to mark pages and special roles.

To mark a page, select a phrase that contains the audio announcing the page number, such as “Page 56”. Then, click Phrase->Assign role->Page on the menu, or press Ctrl+Shift+G. Enter the properties of the page such as page number and page type in the dialog box, and click on the OK button. Other roles such as heading, silence (used for phrase detection) etc can also be assigned in a similar way.

7) Enter the book metadata to the best of your knowledge. By default, the metadata view is hidden. You can make it visible by clicking View->Show metadata view on the menu, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+M.

8) Now, clean all the unreferenced audio that may be consuming a fair amount of disk space, by clicking Tools->Clean Unreferenced audio on the menu, or by pressing Ctrl+L.

9) You are now ready to create your first DAISY DTB. Click Tools->Export as DAISY on the menu, or press Ctrl+E. The standards selection dialog gets displayed with the DAISY 3 radio button selected; click OK. The Export dialog appears; check the checkbox Encode to MP3, and click OK. Your DTB will be created in the subdirectory of your project directory, namely DAISY3 Export.

10) But, you must authenticate your DTB before distributing it. This step is very IMPORTANT as you must ensure that your DTB conforms to the DAISY standard, and hence, runs on DAISY 3.0 players. To validate the exported DTB, click Tools->DAISY 3 validator on the menu. Click on the OK button on the dialog box just opened. If the exported DTB does not conform to the DAISY 3 standard, an error report will be shown. Correct all the errors and export the DTB again.

For details of any of these operations, refer to the user reference manual by clicking Help->Contents on the menu bar of Obi, or by pressing F1.

Remarks:

There are many other commands that let you select a portion of audio and perform very minute audio editing.

You can also perform cut, copy, paste, or delete operations on a section, a phrase, a portion of audio, or text.

In addition to the play command, Obi offers a variety of commands that would make audio editing much simpler, such as preview, play with elapse back, or nudging the audio cursor.

Obi provides a wide range of keyboard shortcuts that would further speed up the process of book production.